Check this latest paper out… should be of interest to quite a few bloggers I imagine!

Mapping the U.S. Political Blogosphere: Are Conservative Bloggers More Prominent? by Robert Ackland

If anyone’s on email terms with some of the “A Listers” who might find this to be a good read could you email them a link for it and the conference…we could do with all the publicity we can get at the moment!!!

Here’s the abstract:

Weblogs are now a key part of online culture, and social scientists are interested in characterising the networks formed by bloggers and measuring their extent and impact in areas such as politics. However, researchers wishing to conduct quantitative social science analysis of the blogging phenomenon are faced with the challenge of using new methods of data collection and analysis largely derived from fields outside of the social sciences, such as the information sciences.

This paper presents an overview of one new approach for collecting and analysing weblog data, and illustrates this approach in the context of a preliminary quantitative analysis of online networks formed by a sample of North-American “A-list” political bloggers. There are two aims to this paper. First is to assess (using different data and methods) the conclusion of Adamic and Glance (2005) in their paper titled (“The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: Divided they blog”) that there are significant differences in the behaviour of liberal and conservative bloggers, with the latter forming more dense patterns of linkages. We find broad support for this conclusion, and empirically assess the implications of differences in conservative/liberal linking behaviour for the online visibility of different political messages or ideologies. The second aim is to highlight the role of web mining and data visualisation in the analysis of weblogs, and the opportunities and challenges inherent in this new field of research.

Keywords: webmining, network analysis, data visualisation

A colleague just asked me by email how she could get started edublogging.

She wants to build contacts with ‘peers / students/ friends / strangers’ in her area (education, culture), get feedback on her PhD research and generally ‘get into’ blogging.

I fired off this quick advice, do you reckon it’s appropriate:

First up: Go create a blog at IncSub Blogs (hey, it’s the best free edublogging service I know :o)

Then:

1. Start writing… useful / interesting stuff that other people will react to / value as information

2. Search Google for blogs that are in the area you are thinking about and comment on their blog / email them your blog describing the kind of things you are doing and would like to get feedback on (many will have blogrolls which will be good places to check for similar blogs)

3. Subscribe to those blogs RSS feeds in Bloglines (here’s a little guide on how to do that)

4. Keep on writing, commenting, reading & emailing…

Whaddya reckon? What would you add / change?

Great response and thoughts from Mark Bernstein on Trevor Cook’s Blogtalk Paper, here are just a few:

“-Viable, small businesses can (and often should) support a blogger, especially in a field where everyone needs to be able to write. One fundamental difficulty managing a small firm is that people are quantized and expensive. If you want to add staff, you usually have to add a whole person — and commit to that person for months or years. This means that small companies are either understaffed (and nobody has time to do anything) or overstaffed (and that usually means there’s no money for equipment that everyone needs). A weblog can convert a a fraction of a person to cash, simply by attracting visitors and making them interested in your products. (If you don’t need more visitors and more prospects, you don’t need more money. Please send it to me, ok?) Every bit helps. Plus, it’s great training, it helps build contacts in the industry, it’s got upside. Needed: For a retail business, 10K visits/month ought to translate to about $15-30K/year gross margin, which can make that extra staff position a bit more palatable.

Notice, too, that this is a revenue stream that clusters of small firms can mine much more efficiently than large firms. A small operation can pick up $10K lying on the table, but the overhead burden on a large company makes this a much more marginal proposition.

-Artists need a blog. If you are (or want to be) a professional artist, you need a channel — a path that leads from you to your patrons. Galleries used to be the channel for painters and sculptors, publishers and agents were the channel for novelists. Just about every artist has some unsold stuff, so you can always use a better channel. At minimum, it’s a place where your collectors and fans can see what you’re doing now and dream about acquiring a new piece or perhaps giving one to their cousin or their alma mater. You never know. Needed: a vocation, a style, and a short list of people who want to know what you’re making.”

Don’t say I never gave you anything :D Am managing to stick to my paper-posting resolution (OK, it’s only day 2) but here’s another full Blogtalk Paper:

Blogging as an Effective Tool in Teaching and Learning Software Systems Development

Abstract:

This paper outlines the strategic framework for applications of new blogging strategies and tools significantly enriched with cognitive, conative and emotive dimensions that can be used for effective teaching and learning of Software Systems Development (SSD) in large groups. Additionally, we provide features included in blogs as an invaluable source for monitoring and assessing the progress of the SSD subject. We focus on a support environment of specialised blogging tools used and comments on shared experiences in the implementation of blogging methods in the SSD subject over the last year at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Next, we review and assess the proposed blogs methodology for information processing as well as for subject evaluation. Then we discuss the successes of blogging, as well as the most common problems (both anticipated and experienced) inherent in using this tool. Finally, we present our knowledge, observations, comments and recommendations for the enhanced use of blogging, in a process of continuous improvement of teaching and learning of SSD.

Index Terms – Blogs, Blogging, Cognitive, Conative and Emotive Aspects of Teaching and Learning, Software Systems Analysis, Software Systems Development. [go read the whole thing!]

Just posted over at IncSub about a workshop I’m running this morning for the Learning Technology Users Group.

What makes this a little more special than your average workshop though is that we’re sending them off at the end to create their very own LTUG Blogs…

So, if you’d like some (online or ftf) workshops on blogs / RSS / wikis / communities of practice & more AND/OR ‘Weblogs @ Your.edu’ set up for you – for very few $s indeed then please get in touch with us.

We can even develop themes which feature your organisation’s templates / branding etc. etc.

Andy Lark on what maketh the blogosphere:

Web = Cold, Blogosphere = Warmth
Web = Transmission, Blogosphere = Conversation
Web = Place, Blogosphere = Community
Web = Anonymous, Blogosphere = Personal
Web = Company, Blogosphere = People
Web = Content, Blogosphere = Expression
Web = Cookie Cutter, Blogosphere = Individual
Web = Closed, Blogosphere = Participatory
Web = Unresponsive, Blogosphere = Gives thanks….

I’d agree with a lot of that….

Righto, from now until Blogtalk Downunder I’ll be releasing (at least) a paper a day… here goes:

Trevor Cook: Up Against Reality: Blogging and the cost of content

This is an absolutely fascinating read exploring bloggers as journalists, corporate blogging, blogging and advertising and the blogosphere as a whole. A must read and I can’t wait to meet Trevor at the conference. Here’s the abstract:

“Blogging offers the enticing prospect of a new journalism which is more participatory, more responsive and essentially open to anyone who has something to say. Yet, the process of creating blogs that are rich with quality journalism is also a commercial challenge; one that will re-shape the blogosphere as we move out of an initial period of amateur enthusiasm to create a more mature and sustainable medium.

We could see, as the blogosphere matures, the emergence of two blogospheres. A top level of relatively few blogs focused on building and maintaining commercially-attractive audiences and a second layer of blogs more focused on extending their networks and communicating with a few people.

Bloggers who want to earn a living as stand-alone journalists providing free content funded by advertising revenue in one form or another will face new constraints. They will have to move well-above the tiny niches of the long-tail to create mass audiences even if they are smaller audiences than traditional media. In addition, they will have to accept codes and practices which allay advertisers’ concerns about their unpredictability.

Most bloggers will always have tiny audiences and this will necessarily restrict their capacity to generate ‘journalism’ in significant quantities. Together these bloggers form a ‘long tail’ but it is a tail rich in commentary and personal experiences not news reporting and investigation. The tail will supplement the content generated by traditional media (including stand-alone journalists) but it is not a serious alternative to mainstream news-gathering.

Only a few bloggers seem to have any serious prospect of generating enough revenue to be able to provide journalism outside the constraints of corporate media. The funding models they are relying on revolve around advertising, sponsorship and less reliably, donations. Already, most of the world’s top bloggers have ads on their sites. These are traditional media revenue-generation models and to make them work bloggers have to generate large audiences. The need to create and sustain large audiences will have important consequences for the future structure of the blogosphere and relationships between bloggers.

At the same time, large corporates, governments and not-for-profit organisations are using blogging to by-pass the media (including journalist bloggers) and speak directly to their audiences. They are much better placed to take advantage of the ‘web as publishing environment’ than all but a few individual bloggers.

Corporations have the resources to generate content but they are likely to do so in a somewhat looser format than the tightly constrained and lame efforts that currently get passed off as ‘communications’. In time, big organizations might become comfortable engaging in blog-style ‘conversations but this won’t happen anytime soon.

None of this means blogging isn’t an important new medium. It just means that we should be realistic about what it can and can’t do, and recognize that even in this brave new world bloggers share some constraints with traditional media and with current corporate communicators.”

Ahhh, haven’t done a multi-bit post for a while so excuse if rusty :o)

Lindon has another beautiful machines posting, nice light glinting stuff in this one, go look at it.

When Robert Patterson says that an article (Fastcompany – Change or Die ) is worth reading… it is… so go read it.

According to Ian it’s an open secret that Becta are going to be pushing open source for English schools. Goodo, now in 20 years time Australia can copy them. Go copy now… better still go and do something innovative for once.

Dekita.org “highlights the Web-publishing work of EFL (English as a Foreign Language)/ESL (English as a Second Language) students, showcases the classroom Web-publishing projects in EFL /ESL and introduces links relevant to personal Web-publishing in language learning contexts” Go TESOLers!

Yay, absolutely, happy birthday Dave… Radio & RSS have changed my life & Scripting’s been on the aggy since day 1, go figure!

C’mon Seb, you know you want to :o)

Josie has launched the Moodle Blog, Moodlebug… good stuff :o)